Tag: science

This year, I took a tour of Wardenclyffe since I can’t go to his birthday. I’ve decided that I would like to live there. Sure there are plants growing out of bricks, and none of the buildings are habitable.

Side Note: Brace yourself. I just looked up the word habitable to make sure I was using it the right way. What has become of my lazy-writer-MO? Oh, wait, I’ve been doing some proofreading gigs. It’s that grammar stuff.

Side Side Note: I still have like five jobs.

Anyway, Tesla! I love him! Here’s why. [All this is from notes I took in 90 degree heat in the blazing sun, so, you know, “facts.”]

The Bauer House

The Bauer House was originally a shoe shop before prohibition. Then it (allegedly?) became a speakeasy. There are tunnels leading out that were probably built to avoid police raids. The last time Telsa came to Wardenclyffe, he sat with the Bauers, speaking to them in German. German, y’all!

Tesla’s Coil

Tesla’s coil uses magnetic and/or electrical fields and can play music when hooked up to a keyboard if it doesn’t first give out so much energy as to render the keyboard inoperable. The first solution to any technology that isn’t working is: Turn It Off and Turn It On Again. I didn’t catch the name of the volunteer running the show here, but he knew, like, everything. Lots of stuff about induction and resonance. We listened to the coil play the theme song to Game Of Thrones.

Did you know that if you play a note on a stringed instrument next to another stringed instrument, the other instrument will play the same note? Yes! Because waves of some sort.

[Again, it was hot, I was sweating–yes, I know, I’m always sweating, but this time it was from the heat–and I was following science the best I could, and I’m not a science idiot but I’m also not Tesla or this very knowledgable volunteer and I don’t play violin, so let’s just accept my “waves of some sort” as accurate. Also, I don’t know if I spelled knowledgable right; it looks wrong. Back to being lazy].

Then we moved onto the Van de Graaff generator. It’s the thing that makes your hair stand on end if you put your hands on it. However, humidity can put a damper on all that electrostatic, lit-er-al-ly. So while the VdG generator messes your hair up in a fun way, humidity interrupts the fun and messes your hair up in a not fun way. This is why everyone moves to Arizona. The dry heat.

Finally, someone played the theramin. It’s an electric instrument that works without touching it. The inventor, Theramin, was from Russia and also invented things for ships to help them with navigation. Possibly.

Teleautomaton

Tesla created the first remote-controlled machines. Like, robotics, y’all. In 1898, he presented his teleautomaton at Madison Square Garden to the crowd at the Electronics Expo. Some people accused him of occultism and that bad magic. Some people thought he had a monkey inside his machine. Because somehow that’s more believable than scientific inventions.

Is there a monkey in here?

Tesla’s Tower Of Power

Tower To The People is a documentary directed by Joseph Sikorski about Tesla’s Wardenclyffe dream. Sikorski offered some insights into the story, complete with sound effects of buildings crashing down when he got to the part about destroying Wardenclyffe. Basically, after Tesla’s friend Astor died on the Titanic, his estate pursued back-rent for Tesla’s living at the Waldorf Astoria and kind of not paying sometimes. Somehow, destroying Wardenclyffe led to getting the money they wanted.

Also, here is exactly what I wrote in my notebook after all that: Telefunken in West Sayville = other huge LI tower.

Discuss and get back to me.

Induction Motor

There were Teslas there. Like, the cars. They look like any other cars but they run on Tesla technology (not monkeys). I don’t know much about cars, but I do know a scooter built for two is the epitome of everything life is meant for.

Train Spur and Lab Chimney

The train spurred off right to Tesla’s lab. It doesn’t do that anymore. The decorative cap on the chimney is called the wellhead. That’s about all I gathered because I was distracted by the plants again.

Lab and Tunnels

The lab has tunnels running out from it to where the tower was. These tunnels were to get water and air to the tower and for steel and copper electrical grounding rods.

That does not sound right at all, but these were words I heard. Feel free to continue to play around with them until you find an order that makes sense to you.

I want to go back, though. There’s something about that place. There are spirits. It hums with something special. So if I could just live there, you know? To soak up all that vibration day after day.

I know. I’m aware that my idea of camping is watching Naked and Afraid while wearing clothes under my ceiling fan. I’m aware that living at Wardenclyffe would mean living without modern day advances like plumbing. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to live there.

So, here’s the deal. I’ll keep visiting whenever it’s open. I’ll keep taking my notes and writing my poems. I’ll keep falling in love over and again with this inventor. My collection, Tesla, My Love, Our Everything, will one day be complete and published, and then maybe it will win an award, and then maybe I’ll get rich and famous and then I can refurbish the Bauer House and live at Wardenclyffe. That’s the plan.

My brother and I are both teachers, so we have summers “off.” Those quotation marks mean we are not working in the normal sense; however, if writing syllabi and reading for the Fall are not working, then syllabi-writing is somehow a hobby that I can’t stop doing, not for the fun of it but for the mandatory necessity of it. (Full disclosure: the Virgo in me loves writing syllabi because I get to plan things. Planning!)

The “off” also refers to the ability to gallivant across the tri-state area to see things we live near yet have never seen before. On the list for the first jaunt (bum leg and all) were a memorial, a bull, and a tiny village of shops and artsy things within Stonybrook. Some of these things were demapped. My brother must have said this word maybe 52 times. Also, we found Tesla. Like, the guy, not the car. But also, the car.

First stop: an apparently demapped Vietnam memorial in Bald Hill. Or, if not demapped, then not easy to find on a map. The GPS took us to in and around the area of the memorial. We could see it rise above the trees along the road. However, we were on the opposite side of the road near the Pennysaver Amphitheatre, which was closed but had an open gate. We rolled in and rolled out. Then I suggested parking in the tiny park next to it and walking back over.

My brother taking pictures of the top of the memorial from all the way across the road and the trees.

And this is how much of it we could see.

As we walked uphill towards the open gate that said they were closed, a tiny car with a large cigar-smoking, 7-11 coffee-drinking man rolled up behind us and shout-asked: You lookin for somebody?

We were like, no, something–the memorial.

After starting to say it was way deep into beyond the gates, it dawned on him what we were talking about and he was like, Oh you guys gotta go back to how you came in and then take the next exit off ’cause this whole area is Bald Hill.

I was like, Yeah, the map said we should go here.

He was like, Yeah, it’s a good thing I found you because you woulda got lost back there and you have no water. He chuckled. We thanked him.

We made our way back to find the next exit and my brother was like, That guy needs a name. At the same time we automatically said, Vinnie. He was totally a Vinnie.

Thanks to Vinnie, we found the memorial. It was a weird exit because the memorial is located in a park in the middle of a highway. It’s quite breath-taking, literally and figuratively. It’s on a hill [hence, Bald Hill], and it’s simply stark in its simplicity and tribute.

Side note: several times, my brother asked me if I could keep walking and if I’d be able to get up the hill. Boys sometimes notice things. I made it up the hill all right and back down, much more slowly than usual, of course.

Second stop: The bull statue in Smithtown is in the middle of a very busy road. At first, we couldn’t find it, so my brother kept asking, When do we give up? I was like, Never. So on we drove until he was like, There it is! It’s hard to miss. First we turned before it and realized we couldn’t pull over. Then we backtracked and I told him to turn into the bike path that also indicated parking. He was like, No because we can’t get out then. I was like, but the big gardening truck is there and it has to get out somehow, pointing at the gardening truck that we would be parking behind. We drove under the overpass and I was like, Pull into the urgent care. He was like, it’s private parking. I was like, there are enough spaces in there so other people can park so we won’t be blocking any urgency. He parked.

We walked over to the bull. It’s pretty large and anatomically correct.

He was like, I’m not sure I got its head in. Thanks, bro. Then again, I did accidentally photobomb his picture (see above).

Third stop: Stonybrook to see a bunch of things that are all in one spot. The neat thing about his wanting to see things is that they crossed over with a bunch of lists I have about the best tea and coffee and oddities across the land. We found a very fancy post office, Hercules, an old boat, pretty water, and the Grist Mill which was closed. I walked around it to see if we could get better photos of the water wheel but my brother was like, this is a private road, and I was like, It’s not like I have a car. Then we couldn’t get around the mill anyway so we headed back.

In honor of Hercules, we look Herculean here.

Two girls arrived behind us and were taking pictures so I offered to take one of them together. They declined just as me and one of them at the same time noticed that we both had Gatsby bags. They’d dropped off books at the little library near the tea shop and I was like, I wished I had books with me to leave. Apparently, it was their second time there, so they knew to bring the books. I know for next time, but I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon because it’s quite a drive and I’ve got other places to see. (Also, we didn’t ask them to take our picture and they didn’t offer, so the only one I have is the one I took by leaning my phone against a tiny tree stump).

Starved, we ate at Crazy Beans. They have a Crazy Ruben and a Crazy Cuban. We debated about which would win in a fight. The ambience and the deliciousness of the food make me forget the outcome.

The biggest part of our outing, however, was a very unplanned excursion into the world of one Nikolai Tesla, inventor of many electric things and patenter of very few. Also, fun fact, lover of pigeons. That fact didn’t actually appear in this exhibit, but it’s something I know because I once wrote a poem called “Tesla And Marconi Throw Down For Patent Rights, Royalties, And, Most Importantly, Fame” that was published in Spilt Milk, a now defunct British online poetry mag. It’s one of my favorite poems I’ve ever written because not only does it discuss science, patents, and what a douche Marconi was, but it also refers to the band Tesla, a very underrated band concerning nostalgia and the 90s (but who also played Jones Beach last year and seemed to be very happy and very much still underrated).

we found the educational and Cultural Center at the back of the large parking lot where all the other shops stand. There was a Tesla exhibit that cost $5 to see (marked down from $7 because of change issue–score!). The first thing I noticed was that everything was written in both English and Russian. Then I noticed it was not Russian. Tesla was not Russian. It was a different language. Now if you think I’m going to remember or look it up at this point, you don’t know me at all, do you. At least I know about his pigeon-love.

Anyway, the exhibit had trivia and lots of things to read and some things that we weren’t allowed to touch because they obviously generated electricity. There was a neon Tesla. There was also the Tesla car that Tesla did not make. We waited around for the presentation that we were told would happen in 15 minutes. It didn’t happen in 15 minutes even after we took a bathroom break, so we decided to bow out of the demonstration, knowing that there would be some sort of electricity happening. We did partake in the Look At How White The Paper Is Under The Tesla-Inspired Light Bulb, however, which was good enough for us.

The misfortune of Tesla stems from his failure to patent his most precious inventions. He did patent some inventions, but not enough. Maybe he trusted people too much or maybe he thought gifting it all to the world was the way to go. However, he died poor. There’s a movie you can watch about it on Amazon, and the exhibit featured a suit and fancy hat worn in the movie.

Since then, Tesla has been following me. Popping up on the television, a documentary about Tesla. Driving down the city street, a street named after Tesla. Tesla cars everywhere I go. Pigeons. Lots of pigeons flying around. Tesla may be trying to tell me something.

Then we saw an old house. Demapped, we first found the address given near the house. Then we drove back and forth through the backroads of Stonybrook and Stonybrook-adjacent, trying to find another old house. Back and forth until, oh, there it is, next to the historical society. The houses were really old. My brother is a history teacher. It made sense to see old things up close. These houses look the same in these photos. They are different.

Tesla-ed out and in a food coma, we found our daytripping coming to a close. I arrived home with a half a sandwich and a bit of a limp, worth every moment.

Because I’m an 87 year old woman, I wanted to turn in before midnight. I even chose a quiet floor to cater to my wanting to sleep. When music came booming from somewhere and echoed throughout the entire hotel, I used my nifty Marriott app to inquire as to why I could hear blasting music on the quiet floor. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if you’re on a quiet floor if there’s an event that goes until midnight. You have to wait it out.

You also have to wait out evens. (read closely)

Even so, I woke up early, did some dance aerobics to a workout DVD on my laptop, and then headed out to the Stop and Shop to gather food for the day. Yes, I’m a gatherer, not a hunter. I then wandered around until it was time for Plausible Impossible.

I’m getting a lot out of attending fiction-writing workshops. Though I don’t write fiction, I teach it in Creative Writing, so it helps to pick up these tips like 1. Create your own set of rules, and 2. Break the rules for conflict, and 3. You can’t know everything. This last one is a really good rule for life, too.

I went to the Lobby to pick up my stuff from Programming. I got a name thingie and a badge thingie, making me a pretty big deal. Thingie.

The woman who handed me my stuff asked me, “Did you dance last night?” I took a moment to think and then said it wasn’t me. I’m not sure why I had to think about this.

Clearly, I blog. I’m on Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, though Insta and Snap are more for fun and not for promotion for me because I can’t really figure out the promotional aspects for my purposes. And I really can’t figure out Snapchat at all aside from sending funny filtered faces to people. Anyway, I figured I could get something out of the panel on Pop Culture and Social Media. The panel wasn’t well attended and two of the panelists were MIA. No biggie. I moved to the front and engaged in listening to everything the three remaining presenters had to say.

There was talk of Refinery 29 (that site that sends you lots of emails when you sign up for it and then you spend two hours reading everything and then you realize you can’t get anything else done in your day so you unsubscribe only to resubscribe when you come across it again and then it all starts all over). There was talk of saying yes to everything and being nice to everyone. I pretty much do that. What I don’t do is talk to people face to face, and that’s kind of why I’m here. I need to do that more as it seems to be key in, you know, life.

There was talk of blogging and friending and being a woman on panels at conventions where that is not the norm. There was the very brilliant idea of hashtagging and metatagging using words that are not traditionally for your own audience so that you reach a wider audience, whether or not they’ll immediately like what you have to say. Simply. Brilliant.

The moderator explained that Twitter will be gone very soon, replaced by Instagram. Hmm. IMHO, until you don’t have to write Link In Bio on Instagram, I don’t think Twitter is going anywhere.

Most of all, however, Things. Got. Weird.

The panel dynamic seemed to be someone who tells bad jokes and knows it combined with two very outspoken voices. I don’t think they knew each other prior to the panel, and it seemed like the moderator had a list of items to discuss but was thrown off by the two additional panelists not being there, and it also seemed that the list was not shared beforehand. This seems to be common at this convention, however, because there’s simply a lot going on all over the place.

So that wasn’t exactly the weird thing. This was the weird thing. Okay, not so much weird as really uncomfortable because sometimes people don’t understand boundaries, especially when they think they are half-joking in a friendly way but what they do is not funny and they aren’t your friend. The moderator basically attempted to cover the mouth of one of the panelists. Jeez. No no no.

The main reason I loved this panel was that the two panelists were simply fabulous at being confident people. Immediately, they were like, that’s not okay. Immediately, he was like, I’m sorry. See? Make it clear and don’t get cutesy, and your point gets across.

Remember that song “The Bad Touch”? Yeah, that’s what this reminded me of. Not the entire song, just the title.

A bit later when the moderator was explaining something or other, the two panelists were whispering to each other. That was a bit distracting, true, but the moderator was like, I’m just going to stop because the thing that gets to me is people talking when I’m talking.

As someone who encounters that every single working day of my life, I get the frustration. I have even used that tactic in a classroom.

However.

I have never done it while on a panel in front of an audience. It was really, really uncomfortable.

So when asked if I was interested in promoting myself on social media, my response was, Well I’m not sure. I wasn’t responding to the question being asked. It was more of an I’m not sure what the hell is happening here. I wanted so very badly to explain to the incident-maker how to not make things weird, but I’ve been really good at not trying to micromanage strangers, putting my teacher-persona aside in situations where I’m not in charge. Plus, the panelists held their own. They did not need my help.

When it was over, I thanked both of the panelists for their insights and followed them both on Twitter. In fact, I realized that I had already started following one of them before the convention when she was retweeted by LunaCon. That’s serendipity.

Things got a little lighter at the Marvel Comics/TV/Film panel. It was billed as a panel of Glenns. All three guys were named Glenn with two n’s. Then another Glen arrived, with only one n, sent there by Programming to do a song about comics. Because his name is Glen.

This is why I’m loving this convention.

The discussion went in all different ways. I kept busy, jotting down snippets of super hero ideas and tidbits. My next collection is going to incorporate super heroes in some way, so anything that sounded like it could be a poem went straight into my notebook. This panel ended in a song by Glen with the one n.

Moving on to the next session: Writing Social Change in SF. Again, the women from the character dialogue workshop was on this panel, so that’s three things I’ve attended that she’s been part of. I feel like I’m fanning out on her. The panel offered insights into diversity and building worlds. Mostly, I was distracted by the two people in the room who were coughing. Lately, I’ve been getting really bad with cringing at first cough. People cough for many reasons, not only because they are sick. Some of them even cough into their inside elbow as we are all supposed to. Still, I get germ-ed out and fixate on where the cough is coming from and my potential of getting sick from it. Then the panel was over.

I walked through the fair and this time bought stuff. Yeah, that’s right. I. Bought. Stuff. Me, the girl who hates shopping. I bought some spices from Auntie Arwin Spices. Then I bought two charms for myself. Yes, that’s right. I bought stuff for myself. I couldn’t decide between the two, so I bought them both. And because I bought them both, I got two dollars off. Steal! Thanks, Geeks Bearing Gifts!

It was break time. I came back to my room to warm up. All the conferences rooms are about 20 degrees below zero. I’m keeping my room at a balmy 70something. I wrote. I ate dinner. I had coffee. I then headed back out into conventionland.

I first sat in on a panel about Cult Films. I thought they might show film clips because there was a projector in the room, but they didn’t. It was still interesting, listening to plots of movies that people watched in the 60s, 70s, and 80s on Channels 9 and 11 or on Mystery Science Theatre. A lot of cult films sound like horror movies. Then there was a guy in the audience who was participating as if he were part of the panel. Then a lot of people were participating. I had nothing to offer, and then I had to go to my own panel.

I look like a poet, right?

Erasing SF and Fantasy: Creating Found Poems! The panel/workshop in the room before me seemed to not want to end, so at 7, I walked in and started putting my stuff down on the panel table. Some people in the room saw me setting up–the folks from the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction thing because of course–and asked what was going on. I was like, It’s poetry! I showed them my book, prompted by my colleague who was attending. I didn’t sell one, but I gave away a space sticker. People like stickers.

There were five people. Two girls I’d met in the lobby. I was walking down the hall from Cult Films, and a guy pointed at me and said to them, She’s a poet so maybe she knows. I was like, Know what? He was like, There’s a workshop. I was like, I’m giving that workshop. So I had the girls follow me there. They were really awesome young women. I keep saying girls because they looked 12. They were, I believe, college age.

The workshop went exactly as I’d hoped. I talked a little about found poetry and then erasure poetry. We went through examples of different ways to erase. Then I let them pick up photocopies of different sources ranging from sci-fi novels to science textbooks. I put colored pencils, crayons, and pastels on their tables. Then they made poetry.

Set up for Found Poetry Workshop

Set up for LunaCon 2017

The room got quiet. Every so often, I suggested ways to spark new poems. They really worked at it. Time flew. I mean, we started late, but it still flew. They all shared what they wrote, and what they wrote was so fantastic. I told them if they wanted to send me their final product, they could. One of the young ladies asked if my email was on the handout. I was like, no but it should be. So I handed out my publicity postcards. Then I said I also had stickers but they could get one only if they bought a book. Both gals were like, Stickers! And I was like, I know, right? And they were like, Stickers are awesome. So I gave them each a sticker. See? People like ’em.

Then I sold two books AND I found out that there’s an old Solaris movie, one without George Clooney, that I haven’t seen and need to see. How did that come up? One of my sample poems is from Liberating The Astronauts, based on Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Want to read the poem? Go here.

I went with my colleague to the masquerade. It lasted for maybe 20 minutes because there were only four entries. Then the emcee made bad book puns as a band that sings about fandom set up. This went on for much longer than it should have. My colleague tapped out after they’d sung two songs, and I thought I’d stay to hear the winners of the masquerade, but I tired pretty quickly and headed to the lobby for some semi-silence before the last panel.

The last panel was Real Bio-Apocalypse. Basically, we’re all going to die because everyone takes antibiotics too often when they shouldn’t like when they have viral infections AND because there are many of us who stop taking meds when we feel better instead of finishing out the dosage, which means we are potentially leaving behind bacteria that is now getting stronger because it hasn’t all been killed off.

I will point out that there was an incessant cougher at this panel.

I called it a night so I could go warm up from the ice den that was the last meeting room. My head is swimming from all the stuff of today. There’s more to come tomorrow, too.

When I pulled up to the hotel / convention center / largest building with the most rooms ever, I wasn’t quite sure even where to go to get in and to the front desk. On the way to what seemed like the front door, I saw this:

And then everything was okay because Big Band AND Harry Potter? Yes, this was the right place in so many ways.

I checked in. I figured out how to use the elevator (you push the floor and the screen on the wall tells you what elevator to go to and then you go in it and there’s no buttons inside because it takes you only to that floor). I found my room. I called internet help to get onto the wifi.

Then I wrote a poem. Yeah, that’s right. I made a cup of free hotel room coffee, and I wrote a poem about the Fantastic Four.

After that, I headed downstairs, got my badge and schedule, and then wandered around to find the first workshop. It was about character dialogue. I thought it would be ideal for me to get some good ideas about how to teach character building in my creative writing classes. I sat down, and then the woman running the workshop told the set-up crew that the chairs needed to be moved because she needed space. All the chairs were pushed aside and she asked us to stand up and move around and shake things out.

My first instinct: Run away.

I fought that instinct and simply shook things out. I realized at that moment, Wow, this is exactly how my students feel when I ask them to do anything. Plus, I’m always telling them to go do things that make them uncomfortable, so I stayed.

I uncomfortably walked around and stopped and talked to whomever was in front of me when she tapped her glass with a pen. I uncomfortably repeated this walking and stopping and talking until I’d said weird things and asked awkward questions to half the room. Then I uncomfortably paired up with someone and had a conversation as a dead witch in a cave (he was an alien in disguise over a million years old).

Then things got a little less uncomfortable because she told us to plan a vacacation as our characters, but we had to give our characters an actual voice. I chose a valley girl witch who needed a new hat, and since the alien traveled the world, I told him to choose where we went. Sumeria. That became our vacation plan, and he needed to drag me because, remember, I’m dead.

The final thing was choosing a character we invented (most people I think were fiction writers and had characters already–I chose a persona in a few of my poems named Judith). We had to answer questions about the character and then say them as if we were the character: I’m Judith, aged 32 or not or maybe or perpetually. I’m disgusted by warm milk in the sink, and I laugh at funerals but only if they’re outdoors. I have two friends, but they don’t know it, and maybe enemies; I really don’t keep track of those things. If I could be anything else in the world, I’d be my mother.

Not too shabby for a poet, huh?

I took a quick walk through the fair on the way out of the workshop. I turned a corner and saw a man in a cape. I gasped on the inside. And then I remembered, oh, yeah, I’m at Lunacon. Things like this are going to happen, and this is where they should happen. Yes, quickly getting over my fear of adults-wearing-costumes.

Then I met up with a colleague friend for dinner. For some strange reason, the hotel restaurant has a pared down menu. It worked fine, though–a grilled chicken sandwich with a salad works for me. We chatted about conventions and books and work and writing and mountain trails that seem shady, like not tree-shady but murder-shady.

We both were interested in the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers reading, so we headed up to that. A group of writers read vastly different stories. That’s the great thing about the speculative genre–there’s a lot of difference within it. The woman who had conducted the workshop earlier was one of the readers, and some of the other readers had been participants.

And now I’m in my room because I’m exhausted already. I know I did only two things, but it was a long day that included driving all by myself, which means using my sense of direction, which means a lot of brainpower and willpower to not get lost. There’s a lot of stuff still going on. There are parties in rooms and official gamers gaming. On the way to the elevators, we passed a party room in which a man was holding a stuffed octopus that was half the size of him, and I startled a bit, but then again reminded myself, hey, this is Lunacon. These things happen here, and they should.

Currently reading: The Circle by Dave Eggers
Currently watching: The X-Files, Season 1
Currently planning: tomorrow night’s presentation on Erasing SF & Fantasy: Creating Found Poems

Whenever I use the word “skillz,” you know I must be up to something creatively good. “Good” is a subjective term. You’ll see. I’ve been playing around with Storify and my MS Movie Maker to teach myself how to teach a class in rudimentary tech skillz. The other reason: my book is going to be published soon, and this is my new marketing plan. Make videos. Storify them. Send them out into the world. Here goes.

UPDATE: Okay, so my mad WordPress skillz seem to not be on point. I’ve got the embed code from Storify and the HTML tab chosen. It’s not working. And so, to see my video skillz, here’s a link instead.